In the past many people have rented out housing to young families and students as a way to invest. Recently there has been a suggestion to further this concept to renting out a vehicle that you have recently purchased.

Car manufacturers are desperately seeking new ways to increase sales, maximise financial returns and address the changing needs of new generations like the millennials, but urging people to rent our their own brand new cars stretches credulity and will fall on stony ground.

News this week that BMW’s Mini will offer buyers of its cars the chance to offset the purchase price by renting out their vehicles surely won’t find any takers. BMW itself has a similar scheme called DriveNow, which board member Peter Schwarzenbauer has said is based on the idea from accommodation sharing web site Airbnb. Ford and GM have also joined in.

Schemes that allow people who don’t own cars to rent by the hour make much sense. This allows the young, who either can’t afford to own a new car, or don’t need one very often, to get wheels for specific jobs. It also allows makers of electric cars which nobody wants to buy, to get them off dealer lots and earn some money.

If it was a scheme that allowed, say, students to rent out their old clunkers to generate enough cash to pay for running costs and then some, it might make some sense. But is there anyone in the history of the world who bought a brand new car – whether it’s a little runabout or an expensive limousine, that would ever let a stranger drive off in it? The fact that they could afford a new car in the first place means the financial incentive just isn’t there.

When you’re in the market for a new vehicle and need one that you can trust will go the distance for you, your best bet is a truck or SUV.

iSeeCars.com, a website that aggregates 30 million used car listings from all around the country, recently looked for all of the vehicles housed on its website from 1981-2010 that have more than 200,000 miles on the odometer in order to see which models are really going the distance for their owners.

The findings, which list the 12 models with the highest percentage of 200,000-mile travelers, are quite interesting. Only one car made the list, the Honda Accord. All the rest are either trucks or SUVs.

Doritos developed a successful campaign airing a winning commercial that an unknown producer created during the Super Bowl. Honda Motor Co. recently did the same thing. Five years later we get to see what Ryo Mukumoto has designed.

Ryo Mukumoto was 22 and into his third year making mock-ups at Honda’s research arm when he beat about 400 other entries in an in-house competition.

Honda made him the youngest lead engineer in the company’s history and gave him a young team to help translate his ideas into reality.

Mukumoto’s vision — a low-slung roadster inspired by a speeding bullet — goes on sale next month in the most competitive segment in Japan’s shrinking car market.

“People of my generation think cars are simply a tool for transportation,” Mukumoto, now 26, said in an interview in Wako City, Japan.

“I wanted them to say — hmm, this car is different,” he said. “We have made a car that will turn heads.”

The introduction of the S660 roadster, named for the 660-cc engine capacity limit that defines the mini car category unique in Japan, comes as Honda searches for a way out of record vehicle recalls and quality lapses.

The company has blamed these problems in part on an overly ambitious sales target that placed undue stress on its vaunted engineers.To Read More Click Here

Here are cars that you can look forward to traveling with you through generation after generation.

Classic cars are made every year, and certain features make them to stand out from others. But what truly makes a car memorable and remarkable enough to stand out from others?

Hagerty Hotlist has truly begun to narrow down the possibilities.Now the predictions are never 100% accurate. But today’s generation will definitely enjoy the range and diversity of vehicles on the list, there’s something for every type of driver.

None of these are economy-car-cheap, but they all sticker at well below $100,000 (what you do with the options catalog is up to you). Park any one of these 10 cars in your garage, and we think you’ll be a happy customer.

And if it’s worth something in a quarter-century? Consider that a bonus.

Cars are expensive. And these days, there are about a million trendy features and add-ons you could pay for in your new car, but probably don’t need to. Many of these features aren’t really that useful (yet). Find out what they are and why.

1.Self-Parking:

What is it:

Self-parking is when a vehicle autonomously maneuvers from a traffic lane into a parking spot to perform perpendicular, angle or parallel parking. Self-parking systems are designed to enhance the parking experience while making drivers feel safer in constrained environments where attention is everything.

Why it’s not useful (yet):

We are all for cars doing things so we don’t have to. But current automatic systems are essentially useless unless you’re trying to park in a very large parking spot. Currently the average driver would be able to park any of the cars with self-parking systems better than their vehicle can, though that could change in the future.

What vehicles feature it:

Auto self-parking was introduced in the U.S. on the 2007 Lexus LS Sedan. Now auto-parking is mainly found on luxury vehicles like the Toyota Prius V option and the Ford Focus Titanium.

Bosch has plans to release a fully automated parking system later this year. We’ll see how that goes.

2.Adaptive Cruise Control

What is it:

Installed behind the grille of a car, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to find the speed and distance of a vehicle ahead. Like cruise control, ACC maintains the vehicle’s pre-set speed but the system is designed to adjust speed in order to maintain a proper distance away from vehicles driving in the same lane.

Why it’s not useful (yet):

Adaptive cruise control is really only useful in stop-and-go traffic like rush hour commutes that can go from 60 mph to a standstill. If this isn’t something you deal with on a daily bases, or mind, you don’t really need it yet. ACC is being enhanced to include collision warning capabilities that will alert drivers through visual or audio signals that a collision is about to take place and braking or steering is needed.

Also, to get full-range adaptive cruise control, expect to pay on average $2,000 to $2,500 extra.

When you’re commuting to work or school daily, your car is an essential tools, just as a saw is an essential tool for a carpenter. When it comes to a saw, you’d consider sharpness, efficiency, reliability, cost and ergonomics. When it comes to a commuter car, you’d be wise to consider price, comfort, reliability and fuel economy.

At this moment, gas prices are falling. The average price at the pump has dipped below $2.00 per gallon in some parts of the country. The mountain range graph of retail fuel prices in the United States over the last decade featured a steep incline from $1.03 per gallon on December 17, 2001to a peak of $4.10 per gallon on July16, 2008, then fell off a cliff to bottom out at $1.59 per gallon on December 29, 2008, according to data gathered by GasBuddy.com, a provider of retail fuel pricing information and data. Patrick DeHaan, a Senior Petroleum Analyst at GasBuddy.com, noted that “consumers are already buying vehicles with lower fuel economy.” He stated that average fuel efficiency for new cars bought in December 2014 was 25.1 mpg, down from 25.8 mpg in August 2014. A similar phenomenon occurred during the last price decline, though the recession muted car buying in general. The GasBuddy Fuel Price Outlook 2015 predicts that the national average will be $2.642 per gallon over 2015, with a peak average of $3.00 and a low average of $2.36 per gallon during the year. “2015 should present a much more temperate gasoline price background than 2012, 2013 and 2014,” according to the report. Still, consumers should avoid complacency. “Avoid making a long-term commitment to a gas-guzzler,” advises DeHaan. “Consider the long-term volatility of unpredictable gas prices.”

To help you avoid complacency, we have put together a list of The Best Cars For Commuters 2015. Our selection is drawn from the Consumer Reports list of Recommended Cars. To be recommended, cars must deliver high scores in the Consumer Union’s “more than 50 tests, have average or better predicted reliability; and perform adequately if included in a government or insurance industry crash test.” Cars are rated on a scale of 1 – 100, with higher scores being best. Next, we examined gas mileage, as reported on the official source for fuel economy, fueleconomy.gov. Better fuel economy equates to bigger savings for commuters. Then we considered fuel capacity and range. Great efficiency without adequate range means more stops to refuel (or recharge) and lost time. We did not factor in purchase price into our selection. The base price range of vehicles this year was from $21,345 all the way to $89,650, with drivetrains ranging from conventional gasoline to hybrid gasoline/electric to pure electric.

So many drivers know the dangers of texting and driving but continue to do it. The only way to describe this nearly irresistible urge to respond to a text message, even while driving is as compulsion — even addiction, an expert said.

“We compulsively check our phones because every time we get an update through text, email or social media, we experience an elevation of dopamine, which is a neurochemical in the brain that makes us feel happy,” said David Greenfield, an expert on “technology addiction.”

Besides the danger of texting while driving, could you benefit from going on a “digital diet?” Here’s a link to a test on Greenfield’s Center for Internet and Technology Addiction web site.

The site says more than three or four “yes” answers out of 12 questions indicate “digital distraction.” (I scored 10 out of 12. Honestly, it probably should have been 11 out of 12.)
AT&T ItCanWait campaign

AT&T ItCanWait campaign

Earlier this month, AT&T released a study Greenfield conducted earlier this year. Not for nothing, AT&T is using the study to promote its new DriveMode app, and a public-service campaign called ItCanWait. DriveMode turns on automatically when the phone moves faster than 15 mph, and turns off again after stopping.

The app silences incoming text message alerts, and automatically responds to incoming text messages, so the sender knows the text recipient is driving.

While plunging oil prices are receiving a warm welcome by U.S. airlines, auto makers, and corn farmers, a persistent decline does carries risks for corporate America.

Crude oil prices have dropped about 25% in just over four months, hitting a three-year low of $77.19 a barrel on Tuesday on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On Friday, they nudged up to $78.65.

The plunge is causing pain in a U.S. oil patch that has expanded substantially in recent years, and figures to hurt manufacturers that supply the energy sector. But the oil slump also is shrinking fuel bills for transportation companies and for consumers, who are likely to spend at least some of the savings, giving a boost to the economy.

Perhaps the biggest direct beneficiary is the airline industry. Fuel is its No. 1 expense, costing U.S. carriers a combined $51 billion last year. Airlines for America, the industry’s leading trade group, estimates that every penny per gallon change up or down equates to $190 million in the U.S. industry’s annual fuel expense at current consumption rates.

Spot jet-fuel prices have slid about 16% from early September, which analysts said shaves about $5 billion off 2015 fuel-bill projections for the industry made before oil began its latest slide. In the near term, those savings “will go straight to the bottom line,” said Scott Kirby, president of American Airlines Group Inc., the largest U.S. carrier by traffic.

For similar reasons, express delivery companies FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc. stand to benefit, as does the trucking industry—which carries 69% of all U.S. freight tonnage. For them, lower fuel costs are helping offset higher wages stemming from a driver shortage.

The express delivery companies generally pass on fuel savings to customers, but not immediately—which means those savings can show up in their bottom lines. “Certainly if prices stay as low as they are, that would be a benefit for the fourth quarter,” UPS Chief Financial Officer Kurt Kuehn said in an interview last month.

Cheaper oil also benefits farmers, and not only because they spend less on tractor fuel. If lower gasoline prices encourage Americans to pump more into their vehicles, that could stimulate demand for ethanol, a fuel additive whose production is one of the biggest users of U.S. corn.

Low gasoline prices also help U.S. auto makers by emboldening consumers to buy more pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, which generally yield higher profits than small cars. Sales of Detroit-brand large SUVs such as General Motors Co. ’s Chevrolet Suburban are up 16% so far this year, and sales of big pickups like Ford Motor Co. ’s F-150 rose 9.5% in October.

But an oil-price slump can cut both ways for U.S. industry.

In the case of auto makers, the government requires them to boost the average fuel economy of their U.S. car and light trucks every year to achieve 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Hitting that target entails selling lots of small cars, electric vehicles, and larger vehicles made with costly lightweight materials and other fuel-saving hardware.

Ford executives warned last month that consumers, lulled by low pump prices, may not opt for vehicles that hold down greenhouse-gas emissions, sometimes with more costly technology. At GM, Chevy dealers have only 59 days’ supply of Suburbans on their lots, but are sitting on more than three months’ worth of unsold Sonic and Spark subcompacts and Volt plug-in hybrids, according to Autodata Corp.

“It’s turning into a stampede away from fuel-efficiency,” says Mike Jackson, head of AutoNation Inc., the No. 1 auto dealership chain in the U.S.

Auto recalls seem to be rampant this year with news breaking about the next big recall of millions of vehicles what seems like every other day. If left unaddressed, these recalls could prove deadly. Here’s what consumers can do to protect themselves.

There are two months left in the year, but 2014 has already broken the record for most auto recalls ever. As of October, automakers had issued recalls for an estimated all-time-high of 56 million vehicles in the U.S. “To put that in perspective, automakers have now recalled more than three times the number of new cars and trucks Americans will buy this year,” the Detroit Free Press noted.
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The flurry of recalls has come fast and furiously in 2014. This week, Toyota issued a recall on roughly 250,000 vehicles in the U.S. related to faulty airbags, on top of a global recall of 1.7 million Toyotas for a wide range of safety defects that circulated last week. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) lists 29 separate auto manufacturer recalls thus far in the month of October, and the agency released a special consumer advisory this week, alerting the owners of 7.8 million vehicles that they should take “immediate action” to replace dangerously defective airbags.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. General Motors recalled 2.7 million vehicles last May, less than one month after the automaker announced it had spent $1.3 billion to recall 7 million vehicles worldwide, including 2.6 million for faulty ignition switches linked to 13 deaths. Ford recalled 700,000 vehicles last spring because of concerns the airbags wouldn’t deploy quickly enough, while some 16 million vehicles from 10 automakers have been recalled because the airbags, made by the Japanese company Takata, could inflate with explosive force strong enough to hurt or even kill the riders the devices are designed to save in the case of an accident. And on and on.

The numbers are so big, and the recalls pop up with such frequency, that you might be inclined to tune them out—not unlike the hacks and data breaches that occur with astonishing regularity at major retailers. But then, you know … there’s death and catastrophic injury. The potential of anything so dire affecting you and your loved ones should make you snap to attention and take action.

While buying a new car may be preferable over buying used, it’s just not an option for a growing number of consumers.

The average transaction price for a new car hit $31,252 last month according to TrueCar.com, which leaves a large number of U.S. households priced out of the new-vehicle market. A prudent, median-income household is able to afford only 54.8 percent of the average new-car cost, according to the latest Auto Buyer’s Affordability Index compiled by Requisite Press.

Not surprisingly, CNW Market Research predicts 41,250,000 used vehicles will change hands this year; that’s up slightly from 2013 but is still down from its most recent high point of 44,138,263 units in pre-recession 2005.

The good news here is that used-cars are expected to become progressively more affordable as a growing number of consumers trade in their current models for shiny new rides. Prices are predicted to fall to their lowest levels in nearly six years after an unprecedented period of inflated market values following the 2008 economic collapse and subsequent inventory shortage. By 2017, the valuation experts at ALG forecast the average new vehicle will retain 49.4 percent of its value after three years, compared to the 54.6 percent retention recorded for pre-owned models through mid-year 2014.

In the meantime, used car shoppers can find some solid – and in some cases unexpected – deals on some of the top-rated used vehicles that can be expected to deliver many years of faithful service.

To that end the folks at the used-car shopping site iSeeCars.com compiled a list of 10 used vehicles from the 2008-2012 model years that are not only expected to have among the longest life expectancy – 200,000 miles or more when properly maintained (based on an earlier study) – but were found selling for around 10 percent below their average market value.